What about Spinning Up?

[dave.auld]

Hi all,

My NAS box was inactive and all HDD's spun down as they should. (TS-509 Pro, 5 Drives)

However, the next morning, the first thing i wanted to do was was access the NAS box from the web admin console.

I noticed that the drive's began to spin up 1 at a time in sequence, and not until all drive had spun up did the admin console on the browser show up.

Would it not be better to issue a spin up to all the drives at the same time, so they spin up together. This would reduce the latency waiting for the NAS to respond.

Just a thought,
Dave

[petur]

Sequential spinup is sometimes done to reduce the peak power load. A harddrive spinning up consumes most power.

That said, my disks also spin up sequentially but very fast after each other, so I do not think much time is lost.

[GTakacs]

As the above poster stated, it has to do with power consumption. The TS-409 comes with a power supply that is rated at 120W maximum at 12V. I just checked, and the 1TB Seagate Barraccuda requires 3.0A of current at startup. That's 36W of power at 12V. If you have 4 of them starting up all at the same time it would require 154W of power, clearly something the TS-409 power supply wasn't rated for. Once the drive is running it takes under 1A to operate so the overall energy consumption is under 50W for the 4 drive setup.